What did you have your settings set to mate? On what sort of system? To be honest, the Auto Detected settings are a little conservative - I only lost 2fps by enabling 2xAA yet benefitted massively in terms of image quality as a result.

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It looks like I am just about to lose my social life for a few days!!! doh!

That's what it's all about though, innit? Trust me - you'll enjoy it, and save some beer money by staying in this week

So can we infer from this review that the graphics settings should be roughly equivalent to that of the demos? You guys didn't really cover my system. 4000+ and X850XTPE doesn't seem to really mesh with any of your choices too well, oh well, that's what demos are for.

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Well Reaper, it's possible to fill in the gaps using the existing data. A 4000+ is a bit faster than the 3700+ system, and a X850 XT PE is a bit faster than the X850 XT tested.

I played through the game on a 2.2GHz P4 but with a X850 XT PE and managed 1024 2xAA well enough. It wasn't 100% smooth all the time, but any stutters didn't impact on the gameplay, just a brief pause when entering a really big room etc Certainly tolerable.

I think you'll find that you could run 1024 2xAA smoothly; perhaps 1024 4xAA as well. 1280x960 0xAA should also be doable, according to Tim's numbers. At outside bet would be 1280 with 2xAA - the visuals will be crispy, but it may or may not be 100% smooth depending on your standards. Tim doesn't settle for anything less than super smooth, but some people like me can tolerate the odd stutter.

So can we infer from this review that the graphics settings should be roughly equivalent to that of the demos? You guys didn't really cover my system. 4000+ and X850XTPE doesn't seem to really mesh with any of your choices too well, oh well, that's what demos are for.

You should be able to play at 1024x768 2xAA 16xAF Medium detail with Volumetric Lighting through the whole game with pretty much no problems. A 3700+ is only 200MHz slower than the 4000+ you've got and an X850XTPE is a little faster than the X850XT.

My suggested settings for all of the video cards we tested should be pretty conservative and you can increase them a little if you don't mind a bit of lag here and there.

Oh yeah, I forgot to mention Detail: you can have a mix of Medium and Maximum. Have a play to decide what you think is important. Max Particles looks so cool, but gets in the way of the gameplay a little when you can't see what you're doing

What did you have your settings set to mate? On what sort of system? To be honest, the Auto Detected settings are a little conservative - I only lost 2fps by enabling 2xAA yet benefitted massively in terms of image quality as a result.

That's what it's all about though, innit? Trust me - you'll enjoy it, and save some beer money by staying in this week

Settings were pretty much what it told me, then i whacked the res up to 1280x1024 to match my TFT - I guess that is where i went wrong, resolution over quality plus the fact i had no AA either!!

My system is DFI SLI-D, AMD64 3000+ (venice) @ 2.7GHz, 1GB Mushkin Redline, 6600GT etc etc so although it's not great, i expected more from FEAR than i got!

even on my aging xp2600 1gb ram with an fx5500 its playable (autodetected as a meduim spec machine), frame rates are a bit low but with some tweaking of the detail levels even a modest machine like mine will play it quite happily, time for a new gfx card tho ,going to have a little overclocking sesh to see if I can get it running a tad faster whilst i raise some cash

and you're right the AI is simply amazing

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i play on 1024x768 0xAA 8xAF , no SS, every other option enabled to maximum (sound, cpu etc) except Medium Textures Medium Shaders..
performance decreases too much for my card when i put Max Textures.. i never tried full shaders though
runs smoothly for my taste.. i lower settings abit for multiplayer

I downloaded the MP demo a few weeks ago and this just promted me into installing it. Spent 20 mins setting up the gfx to get them to the best possible quality without too much performance drop (Will post settings tomorrow). I decided to make a server to explore the maps and get a feel for the game as i do with every game, The server filled itsself up, so i ended up running a server for 5 hours hauling some serious ass and really getting into the game! Really is a cool game.
(sorry )

In the advanced computer options, everything is at max aside from sound and particle bouncing, those are at medium.

I think these settings look pretty good, and the game plays nice and smooth. I believe I have room for upping something, what can I up that would be the most noticable without going too far?

I found that very choppy when I played with a 6800 GT. I think the in game test scored something like 85% over 40fps, but the average during the game was like 41fps - I'll dig out the graphs if you'd like me to.